Monthly library update: May 2025
Date published: 2025.06.01
Another month has passed, huh?
Video essays 🎥
Horny Men are Destroying Tech and "AI"
Music 🎵
Napkötöző – Platon Karataev
I have a weakness for Hungarian. I’d never want to learn it (sorry), but I love the sound of it, so new music releases sung in this language are always a pleasure to check out. I like this indie album!
Favourite track: Ki viszi?.
冀西南林路行 – 萬能青年旅店
A Chinese rock album with good instrumentals and an over 10 minutes long song??? Waow…
Favourite track: take a wild guess. anyway 河北墨麒麟
算云烟 – 谢春花
Some calmer and softer Chinese music for a change. Check out 知非 and
无声叛逆 too if you like this album, they’re just as good.
Favourite track: 我从崖边跌落.
泾渭无间音乐专辑 – Various Artists
There’s a donghua of my favourite baihe novel coming. And there’s a bit of the soundtrack available online already. You know? (*vibrates so strongly it’s hard not to pass out*)
Favourite track: 清风叹 (yeah, I’m sending you a link to Bilibili so you can watch the vid. it has a translation too. enjoy)
Deus Ex Machina – 珂拉琪 Collage
Sometimes the YouTube algorithm knows what to suggest to you, actually. 珂拉琪 Collage is a Taiwanese indie band that write their songs in a mix of Asian languages: Hokkien, Japanese, and Amis. It’s a very unique project!
Favourite track: 謀殺石蓮. It’s SO fucking good
El Desafío – Equinoxious
A nice coldwave album from Mexico. The instrumentals are so nice.
Favourite track: La instantánea sensación de ser una piedra que sacude el mundo.
Vapen & Ammunition – Kent
Some alternative rock from Sweden. You might already know this band – they’re more famous than most of the music I usually share – but I only discovered them this month.
Favourite track: Sundance Kid.
加冕日 – Aya-啊呀呀
Lately I’ve been on the look-out for Chinese Vocaloid songs, mostly because a lot of popular Chinese music is simply… boring, and Vocaloid songs tend to be more on the energetic (and edgy) side. This is a cool metal album!
Favourite track: 余容.
万梦集 – Winky诗
He has such a nice voice.
Favourite track: 连挑风波去.
Birthing – Swans
An album seemingly created for Me, In Particular. Four 20 minutes long songs, two more songs that are over 10 minutes long, one shortest song almost 7 minutes long. Heaven.
Favourite track: I Am a Tower, simply because it speaks to me on a personal level, although
Birthing would be my second choice.
Art 🎨
An absolute goldmine of beautiful art. Check it out
Poetry
Dialogues (Against Literature) – Jennifer Chang
Years later I will remember this terrible time as not only about myself
Or not only that to punish my father I made myself unhappy
From my window I could see that much else was wrong
Across the street new construction had struck open an underground pipe and for months after water would shudder down the boulevard
Not shudder, exactly
It was as if the road had been forced open and was now weeping violently
I had known such devastation in my youth but now
It was happening to the world around me
Summer stretched into November
The chemical clouds I mistook for glory
Benzene flowering overhead like a wild lily
Pinkly iridescent
I thought of my father’s loneliness and felt every cell in my body fall silent
And knew this was love
And knew I had come very far in my distance
To let tenderness rule me
Of all the men I despised he perplexed me most
Wretched as Aristophanes and as maddening
Or that professor who shot himself in bed
Leaving a mess for his widow
Whose bulbs I planted one fall when she was too sick to put her hands in the loam
He would lean over me until his beard stroked my skin
Just to say I had misread Cortázar
How one day in my waning thirties I could no longer read Hemingway ever again
“Ever again,” a phrase that pains like an early death
In the past my father could choose to forget me and the wounding words we exchanged
And now I forget why I left him behind
Something to do with poetry or risk
That other professor declaiming at a downtown café the need to uproot oneself in order to be brave on the page
As if he ever left his house, as if neither of us had overheard Flaubert flaunting his dull life
Or my father’s father who thought nothing could be better than being his student
Looking around the table accounting for his black-eyed hungry children
All terrible at philosophy
There was only one daughter who even into old age everyone described as foolish
Chiding her poor decision to fall in love with a dying man
Though in this she was no vanguard
She held him as he passed, wept the whole of her breath into him, and then the next year sat for days, alone, at her mother’s deathbed
And where were her brothers
One was in prison, another in Athens, and the youngest was across the alley eating noodles with a neighbor
Even now my father sleeps through the night and does not dream
Books 📘
The Hot Zone &
Crisis in the Red Zone – Richard Preston
Hmm. I actually feel conflicted about these books.
At the end of April I saw a brief description of the first documented encounter with the Marburg virus somewhere on the Internet. I instantly became interested in digging a bit more into filoviruses and their history; before that, all I knew was the blurry memory of the Ebola panic from 2014, and I was 13 at the time, so go figure. I first researched on the Internet, and then, with my thirst for knowledge still not properly quenched, I turned to literature.
Preston’s books are good resources on the topic because he genuinely researched the facts and the little details. The way he writes frustrates me so much though!!! I know that the way he dramatizes the events sells, The Hot Zone was a #1 NYT bestseller for a reason, of course it sells. And you might even enjoy it! I don’t. I like my nonfiction books serious, boring, and to-the-point. No need for fiction-like storytelling in my nonfiction books. Please stop trying to entertain me.
Either way, these two books are filled to the brim with lots of genuinely fascinating information and knowledge, so if you’re interested in the topic, give them a try. (Or don’t – maybe there are better ones out there. I’m taking a short break from researching filoviruses for now, but I can tell the fixation’s not over yet, I just need a breather to avoid complete burnout, so I’ll be checking out some other ones in the future.)
You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World – Ada Limón
For some reason, I really dislike anthologies of short stories. For some other reason, I love anthologies of poetry. This one’s no exception, really.
I enjoyed 
“Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery” by Danez Smith, and “Taking the Magnolia” by Paisley Rekdal (couldn’t find this one online anywhere, sorry!) the most.
Mangas 📗
《一个关于糖果的故事》 A Story Concerning Sweets
The first manhua I’ve read entirely in Chinese, and I’m glad to say it was actually a good one. It’s GL! And has gorgeous art style. You SHOULD check it out
I’ve checked and English translation is fully finished and available on MangaDex, but if you want to read the original in Chinese, it’s available for free here. You’re welcome :3
Polish stuff
Książki 📘
Godność, proszę. O transpłciowości, gniewie i nadziei – Maja Heban
Ważna dla polskiego środowiska trans (i LGBT ogółem) książka napisana w 2023 roku przez transpłciową aktywistkę. Wartościowa pozycja, choć nie dowiedziałem się z niej raczej nic nowego (a informacji było w niej zawartych sporo, po prostu jeśli się od lat aktywnie śledzi wieści dot. tego środowiska, to trudno o coś, czego już się nie wie), ale i tak na duchu podniósł mnie zarówno fakt, że ta książka w ogóle istnieje, jak i jej ostatni rozdział („Nadzieja”), który, w przeciwieństwie do wcześniejszych, kierowanych raczej do cispłciowego odbiorcy, zdaje się być jednak dedykowany innym osobom trans. Książka nie jest długa, więc tym bardziej nie widzę powodu, żeby za nią nie chwycić.
Brought to you by: Aleks 🌌